"Balmont, Blok, Brusov, Sologub…"
She interrupted him hastily—a slender little reed: "As a whole I know little of foreign writers …"
In the town—neither in the high-school, the library, nor the newspapers—did they know of Balmont or Blok, but Olya loved to declaim by rote from Kozlov, and she spoke French.
The factory lived its dark, noisy, unwholesome life sunk in poverty beneath the surface, steeped in luxury above; the little town lived amid the fields, scared and pressed down by the factory, but still carrying on its own individual life.
Beyond it, on the side away from the factory, lay the pass called the Wolf's Ravine. On the right, close to the river, was a grove where couples walked. They never descended to the ravine, because it was so unpoetic, a treeless, shallow, dull, unterrifying spot. Yet it skirted the hills, dominated the surrounding country; and people lying flat in the channel at its summit could survey the locality for a mile round without being seen themselves.
Alexander Alexandrovitch was a married man. The shepherd lads tending their herds at pasture began to notice how every evening a man on a bicycle turned off the main road into the ravine, and how—soon after—a girl hurried past them following in his steps, like a reed blown in the wind. As befitted their kind, the shepherds cried out every abomination after her.
All the summer Olya had begged Agrenev to bring her books to read; she did not notice, however, that he had never once brought her any!
Then one evening, early in September, after a spell of rain which had prevented their meeting for some days, there happened that which was bound to happen—which happens to a maiden only once in her life. They used always to meet at eight, but eight in September was not like eight in June. The rain was over, but a chill, desolating, autumnal wind remained. The sky was laden with heavy, leaden clouds; it was cold and wretched. That evening the cranes flew southward, gabbling in the sky. The grass in the ravine was yellow and withered. There was sunshine there in the daytime, and Olya wore a white dress. It was there the two of them, Agrenev and Olya, usually bade each other adieu.
But on that evening, Agrenev accompanied Olya to her home, and both were absorbed by the same thought—the aunt! Was she sitting by the window without a lamp waiting for her niece, or had she already lighted it in order to prepare the supper? Olya hoped desperately that her aunt would be in her usual place and the lamp unlit, so that she could slip by into her room unseen and secretly change her clothes.
Not only did Olya and Alexander Alexandrovitch walk arm-in-arm but they pressed close together, their heads bent the one to the other— whispering … only of the aunt. Olya could not think of the pain or the joy or the suffering—she was only thinking how she could pass her aunt unnoticed; Agrenev felt cold and sickened at the thought of a possible scandal.